DON QUIXOTE TILTING AGAINST THE ARMY OF ALIFANFARON.
El Haya, 1746.
9th Edition.
models of that true art of which we know he had grasped the principles.”
Cervantes had, we must suppose, been wrenched from his artistic principles and ideals by the pinch of poverty; yet at this late period of his life, his fame as an author was spread not only throughout Spain, but in France, Italy, Germany, and Flanders. When Francisco Marquez Torres, Chaplain to the Archbishop of Toledo, was interrogated by some members of the French Embassy in Madrid, as to the age, profession, quality, and fortune of the celebrated author of Don Quixote, Señor Torres found himself “compelled to say that he was an old man, a soldier, a gentleman, and poor.” The chaplain, who tells this story in the approbation prefixed to the Second Part of Don Quixote, continues: “To which one of them responded in these precise words: ‘But does not Spain keep such a man rich, and supported out of the public Treasury?’ Another of these gentlemen broke in with this idea, saying, with much acuteness, ‘If it is necessity compels him to write, may God send he may never have abundance; so that, poor himself, he may make the whole world rich.’”
Cervantes, in his long and varied career, had suffered much from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but in the last months of his life he was to endure the most cruel and malignant hurt that the envy and enmity of man could inflict on an author. In the summer of 1614, just two years before his death, when Cervantes was leisurely completing the second part of the work, which was to make his name immortal, there appeared at Tarragoza a work entitled, “The Second Part of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, containing his Third Sally.” This work, vulgar, lewd and malicious, purposed to be the continuation and the end of the story which Cervantes had published ten years before. The name of the author was given as Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda, of Tordesillas; the book was dedicated to the “Alcade, Regidors, and Hidalgos of the noble city of Argamasilla,” &c.; the licensing for printing was in the handwriting of Doctor Francisco de Torne, of Liori, Vicar-General to the Archbishop of Tarragona, and the publication was justified by the contention of one Dr. Rafael Orthoneda, who declared that it “ought to be printed, because it seemed to him to contain nothing immodest or forbidden.”
If this publication had revealed no more than a mean and avaricious desire to profit by the popularity of the First Part of Don Quixote, and to defraud Cervantes by forestalling him in the demand which was in waiting for the completion of the work; if the author had imitated the style and spirit of the great original with the sole thought of skimming Cervantes’ market—even so the outrage would have been almost unparalleled at that period in the history of letters. But the conspiracy, for conspiracy it was beyond doubt, was deeper, more subtle and diabolical
